C (2:26)

You keep going. If you just keep guessing, I'll just say yes to everything, probably. Mitch. Yep.

B (2:31)

Okay. Professional basketball player. Now close.

C (2:38)

No, fisherman. Yep, Close. You Were close, man.

B (2:41)

Okay. All right. Some kind of sport I was casting the line somewhere and had to catch, so.

C (2:47)

Yeah, exactly.

B (2:48)

Fresh water or salt water?

C (2:51)

Fresh water. Yeah. I'm. I'm one of these weirdos that will put a ruck on my back. A backpack. 40. Loaded with 40, 50 pounds of gear, camera equipment, fishing gear, and all that kind of stuff. And I will start at 9,000ft above sea level and end up somewhere around 11 or 12, depending on the hike. And I chase these majestic trout that are in the most pristine waters in the world, all the way up with the continental divide, like, 11, 11, 12,000ft in the air. Wow.

B (3:23)

You're the first person I've ever heard talk about that. And the salmon are of a different caliber than what we get at the market.

C (3:31)

The trout are. Yeah, sorry. Right. Yep. They're a salmonoid for sure. Yep. And honestly, I mean, those fish up at that altitude have a very specific diet. It's mostly scuds is what they eat. So it's a very small freshwater, microscopic shrimp. And so it leaves there because it's crustacean. Technically, it is, like, pink. Those depending on, like, they're pink or they're orange. And then when they eat them, all the carotene goes into their meat, and it looks and feels and tastes like some of the most what you would call salmon meat. Essentially. It's just. It's just a delicacy. Yeah, it's incredible. I had some clients out. I have these new clients that can move from New York City, and my wife and I had them over for dinner, and I. That's what I fed them. I fed them. I gave them the full western treatment. I gave them. We fed them fresh trout, elk and bison.

B (4:29)

I have never had elk or bison. Trout I've had, but probably not the pristine trout that you're referring to. That sounds like a delicacy.

C (4:39)

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Yeah.

B (4:41)

And how do you. Thousand square feet.

C (4:44)

Sorry.

B (4:45)

How do you get to 9,000 square feet?

C (4:48)

9,000Ft above sea level?

B (4:49)

Yeah. I'm sorry. Not square feet here. I am an architect now.

C (4:53)

How do you. That's a big home.

B (4:55)

How do you get to 9,000ft?

C (4:57)

Feet, yeah. Well, a lot of those. So those, you know, you can access the trail heads typically around here at about 8 or 9,000ft. Right. So you're driving.

B (5:08)

Okay. You could drive to them.

C (5:10)

All right, you can drive to that. But then from there, if the road stops and then your feet start.

B (5:15)

Okay.

C (5:16)

It's on you to get up to the Rest of the way. Yeah, exactly.

B (5:19)

So, all right, so then. And you do this solo, or do you do this with other people?

C (5:25)

Half. About half and half, I would say. So, like, this weekend, I could not convince anybody to go on a quote unquote death march with me. And that's what my buddies call them. Right, because you're exerting probably 3 to 4,000 calories on one of these hikes because, you know, a 9 going from 9,000 to 11,000ft. There's a couple different things that happen to you. I mean, the atrophy that you experience because of the lower oxygen in the air at that altitude is just something else that'll kind of really set you back as. As a person. Unless you're like me and you do it two to three times a week. High altitude athletes are just, like, on a different level of athletes. There's this guy who is a sort of. I. I make fun of that. I'm like, in this fake competition with him. He doesn't even know who I am. His name. His name is Cameron Haynes. And my business partner was like. Was telling folks that. And me that, like, oh, this guy could keep up with you. And I'm like, cameron Haynes from Montana, who does these trail runs. He finishes his trail run where I start. He goes from 7 to 9. I'm going from 9 to 11. So half the time I take people, if I can convince them to come on one of these crazy death marches with me, and half the time I can't convince them. For example, we had a. I call it Camp Comfortable Uncomfortable. Two weekends ago, I had. I invited, like, nine of my college buddies out and only got one to show. And then one of my other friends who's local here showed up and we went on on Saturday, had a great time. It was. It was kind of one of those. One of those journeys. We went from nine to, I think, 11, two or something. And then, you know, the distance was about, like 12 miles round trip in one day. And the second. The second guy dropped out, so that. So it was just down to two people on Sunday for the second one. So it's tough to keep people around doing that stuff, but. But I enjoy it now. You can check out all the adventures on Fishing with Lance. I'm the Colorado's number one fishing YouTuber at this point.

B (7:29)

Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. And certainly we'll look into that. I. I have fished salt water one time for bonita in the Redondo beach harbor, which is a beach city in Los Angeles County. And I think you have to have a real love for fishing because I didn't feel very well going out on the boat. So that left an impression. So the beach for me was volleyball, but that's the Southern California way. So how did you get into the design business? Architecture business? And I presume you build. Yeah, got a shop right there. And that. That isn't for show.

C (8:09)

Well, it kind of is, actually.

B (8:10)

I mean, yeah, I like it.

C (8:13)

Yeah, it's different. The clients like it when they come in. My son was even making. He's an artist, and I commissioned him to make this beautiful art. And it was sitting on the. On the shop floor. Man, that was like hook, line, and sinker for any client. Any potential clients that came in, they were like, this is like Creativity Central. I'm 42. When I was 13, I tried working on the farm with my dad. I grew up in northwest North Dakota, very rural area, between a sugar beet farm and a cattle ranch. And on the sugar beet farm, we were such poor farmers, we had to, like, hand, water everything. It was crazy. And the work was real hard. But I wasn't adverse to the hard work. What I was adverse to was my dad's attitude. And we just did not get along at all. It was that typical sort of teenage versus dad sort of thing. I lasted about a week, and I go, I just can't do this anymore. I'm going to go call your best friend up. He's a general contractor. I'll see if I can just pick up garbage. I'd rather pick up garbage than work for your dad. Yeah, yeah. It was just awful. And. And so I did. I called his best friend, Bruce. His best friend said, hey, I got. Yeah, I got these 80 roofs. We got a huge contract. We're going to do one roof a day. You can be my gopher. I'll pay 725 an hour. And I was like, oh, cool. What is a gopher? He goes, oh, you're gonna go for this and go for that. When you're done going for all the things and you can get up on the roof, you can learn how to proof. And Mitch, I was the best gopher Bruce ever had, hands down, because I wanted to learn how to do it.

B (9:42)

Sure.

C (9:43)

And so I just got completely addicted to the idea of building. And I also experienced working with my first entrepreneur ever in my life. Right. And that was just kind of a word that I didn't really understand until sort of even years later. Bruce. I got the rich dad, poor dad experience. With, without ever reading that book. I read the book, maybe only it's about 10 years ago. And reflecting on it, I went, oh wow. I had the rich dad, poor dad experience. My dad was a farmer, poor dad, rich dad was Bruce. He had no anxiety around money. It wasn't that he was like making money hand over fist and had all these toys and huge mansion or anything. It was just there was a vastly different approach and mindset to money. And so I just worked so hard for Bruce. About halfway through the summer, he pulls me aside and he, because I think he saw some potential in me, he didn't see other people. And he goes, how much do you, how much do you think, how much am I paying? How much do you think I'm charging the owners for every hour I'm paying you? And I'll go 725 an hour. And he laughed and I was embarrassed. Then he explained the multiplier, right, I know, I'm charging you, I'm charging the owners two to three times your, your labor. And I thought I said isn't that immoral? And then he explained, no, it's, this is how it works. I got a pro, I got overhead. There's profit, there's risk, there's insurance. Oh my God, Insurance, right? Yeah, Just you can imagine tools, you name it. Things are going to go wrong. He's got to pay for it. I was just like, oh, wow. And then I saw the, you know, the non anxiety of money. By the end of the summer, Bruce pulls me aside and he says, what do you want to be? And I go, I want to do what you do. Like how do I do what you do? And he goes, well, next summer you don't work for me after. You go work for a different contractor and learn a different trade. And you got to do that every summer. So I did that up until I was 20. I even went to technical college for building construction technology. And I was on track to be a builder first. And then our capstone project in tech school was we had to build a house together. And the word architect popped into my head. Never really thought of that word. And as a 20 year old guy, I had this light bulb go off. I, I emphasize that part because like I have 20, 20 year old children, okay, who just are schlepping along and not really like having these sort of epiphanies, at least I don't think. And it went, oh man, if I became an I like school suddenly, like what if I became an architect next? Then I could get the Clients first, because that's how it works. You know, you design the house first, then you build it afterwards. And most of the time vertical integration. Yeah. And I thought, wow, I would be like unstoppable. I could out compete every general contractor. I bet. So I went to, so I applied to North Dakota State University, 70 miles north. Got in accelerated in that program, graduated number one. And then one more word came into my head, Mitch, during my fourth or fifth year and it was, oh, developer. Real estate developer. Like that's who hires architects for big commercial stuff, you know. And man, I should be that too. Like I gotta be that one day. So graduated, came down to Boulder, got laid off during the Great Recession because of two schmucks who couldn't figure out how to run an architecture business. It bore me and my business partner from that. We started in like the classic garage style, except it was an apartment. We've been going strong from 2010 to now 20, 25, 15 years. We've grown from two to 10 staff members and then vertically integrated. F9 Production is our architecture company. F14 Productions is our general contracting firm. And F12 is our real estate development firm. So we do all three.

B (13:41)

And then you hire the subs.

C (13:43)

We hire the subs. I had like a construction manager, but I just got tired of his attitude and he was such a stickler, he was losing his business that I fired him happily like a couple months ago.

B (13:56)

So you're the sub. I mean, you hire the subs now?

C (13:59)

Yep, yep. So Alex and I run our own jobs. You know, we each bring in different clientele into the architecture firm. And then we conquer and divide and we keep those same, those same clients through the building process that we, we select. Like we're sort of a, we, we get to. That's really cool too is we get to actually just procure the clients we want specifically to build. Will design for almost anybody. That's pretty short and sweet process usually. But the build process can be. For instance on these two, two, two houses I'm building right now, they're, they have budgets between 2 and 3 million dollars. They're like 24, 25, 26 month build plus we got to warranty it, so.

B (14:39)

Oh, those are, those are luxury homes then. Especially if, you know, Colorado is not a, not a cheap state. I understand. I had. Yeah, go ahead.

C (14:50)

Sorry. We're mini California. That's all I was going to say.

B (14:54)

Well, it's. I, I was there once or I've been there to Colorado. Well, actually about three or four times. Come to think of it, but I had a former sister in law that lived where the Red Rocks were in Little. Little. Where's that?

C (15:08)

You're close. Keep going.

B (15:10)

Yeah. Outside of Denver and I found some of the homes to be beautiful. I know we were considering that as a potential move because my ex wife was a lawyer and they had California had reciprocity with Colorado. We came very close to making the move and glad I did now for reason because I'm not with her anymore and that would have been a bit of a challenge, but the scenery was just beautiful. There's nothing like Colorado. It's breathtaking, especially if you're into the outdoors world. I don't think there's a nicer place in the U.S. yeah, I agree.

C (15:47)

I wish my family would agree they should visit more. They still live in North Dakota. It's a nice place up there, but it's not Colorado.

B (15:55)

Not. Not the same. So you started this firm. Now what makes you different? Is it because you're totally vertically integrated? Because typically you're one but not all. I mean you've started at the, at the lowest level and then now you. There isn't any higher. I guess if you own the bank, that would be the next. It's like, okay, then you control the financing. That would be one more step in the ascension model.

C (16:20)

Yeah, well that's pretty obvious in my opinion about how we're different. But the non obvious stuff is we pick up the phone, we email back, we text, we communicate that.

B (16:35)

Oh my gosh.

C (16:36)

Yeah.

B (16:38)

Oh my gosh. This is shocking. Lance, you actually call people back?

C (16:44)

Yep, sometimes. Sometimes in the same hour. It's pretty crazy.

B (16:48)

My word.

C (16:49)

And no matter what, no longer than one business day for sure. Yeah. Your audience is hopefully hearing that dripping sarcasm and, and if you're watching on YouTube looking at the, you know, our expressions. But it's that I had to emphasize that because that, that has been like the pretty much big difference.

B (17:12)

Well, that is a key differentiator is customer service being courteous. And it's. Some people in a different generation than I grew up in make a big deal about talking on the phone as though you. They're doing you a great service to talk on the phone or I. If I'm giving my money to somebody, I need a response, I want to know. Sometimes it requires a phone call because there are nuances that go way beyond an email or a text.

C (17:45)

Yeah, yeah, there's. That's. If you go on, if anybody goes on LinkedIn and they look me up first name Lance. Last name psycho, C, A, Y, K. You'll see that my preferred pronouns are positive, reactionary, and what we. What that really means is it's. It's like. It's sort of a punch back at those two schmucks that laid me off and then spawned me. This spawn of entrepreneurialism is. I just. It was very. The path forward was. It was like as difficult as it was easy. What was difficult was the economy sucked right when we got laid off. It was a great recession. We had no. It was hard to get clients. We had no built work. We weren't.

B (18:31)

2008.

C (18:33)

Yeah, 2008. Yep, exactly. 2008 to about 2012, 2013. It was real rough in Colorado. We were just barely. We barely had enough to make it. Enough work to make it work. And the big. That was the hard part. The easy part was picking up the phone. The easy part was emailing. The easy part was texting. And those guys just could not figure that out. And a lot of other folks still aren't. Haven't figured it out. I'd say the majority of people are still just really awful, bad communicators. On the architecture and design and construction side of things. It's. I don't know what. I don't know if it's. I. I've. I've learned through my own podcast and interviewing people and just talking with folks and just seeking to understand more about them that there's a. There's, you know, a lot of people have anxiety about it. A lot of people see a text I'm understanding, and they're. They. They feel an anxiety to. Once it. Like to respond to it, so they just don't. And I'm like, what? That seems kind of crazy to me. Like, isn't your anxiety relieved by answering the question or. Or whatever? So, you know, there's all these different walks of life, but that's. That's honestly the. One of the most fundamental things. And so we have these nine principles, right? There's F9 Productions. That's our. One of our company's names. As I mentioned, there's nine principles. Number four is communicate. It's. Maybe it should be number one, I don't know. But we have these principles that guide us. And I think if you go. If anybody goes and reads through them, if they're curious, that's. You go look at a contrasting architect that competes against us in Colorado. And that's one of the things that separates us.

B (20:19)

Well, something so basic is customer service, treating people with respect, returning phone calls. Like you said, sometimes within the hour or getting back to people, those common courtesies, little hinges, swing big doors. A metaphor from your industry. Yeah. It matters to treat people well because oftentimes they'll forget a lot of the details, but they'll remember how you made them feel.

C (20:50)

Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. Some people, though, you want them to remember how you made them feel. Right. Because, like, there's 2% of clients who are just. You're never going to please. And it's like, my fault or is it theirs? You know? You know, I've got this couple right now that's just challenging you. Oh, God. There. That's a word to use. Sure. Challenging. They're challenging. Yeah. I. They seem to remember all the details and I'm so. Oh. Which is good and bad. Yeah. But they remember them in their own way, so it makes things real difficult. Yeah.

B (21:23)

Well, how about keeping things in writing to cover your tucus?

C (21:30)

Yeah, yeah. Super, super important. I know it. Sometimes. Sometimes I feel like I get on. I'm on the phone with folks and need to. I don't. I've been contemplating doing it or not. And it's like, should I follow up with a. Here's what we talked about on the phone. Do you. You know, do you agree? But it sounds like to do that.

B (21:50)

I have to do that.

C (21:52)

Yeah.

B (21:53)

Otherwise they're going to say, you said this said. And then the beauty of doing what we're doing, we're being recorded and there's a transcript. Record everything. So you cover your butt. I think it's necessary, unfortunately, but it's necessary. A handshake doesn't go as far as it once did on a green to thing. So tell us about your podcast.

C (22:17)

Yeah. Well, we started. We started the firm in 2010. Right. So. And then we got to 2017. We'd seen some success. We had grown from at that point, two. Just two people, Alex and I, to, I think maybe five or six. We had a real office that we were releasing. We had been on television a few times with HGTV doing some pretty unique stuff. We'd won some awards and it was like year seven. And everybody who knows business knows that most businesses fail within that first seven years. That there's a real, like, this is statistic that's sort of beaten to your head if you go to business school or just. Or have a good back. Business acumen.

B (22:57)

Sure.

C (22:58)

So we got to year seven and we went, oh, man, we haven't failed yet. This is cool. We should tell our story. We're big podcast fans, you know, we would, you know, we just grew up listening to podcasts as guys in our early 20s. It's like I kind of want to tell our story. I want to, I want people to. It would be great if more people picked up the entrepreneurial, you know, flag pole and just went. Ran with it, the baton. So we started that. We started Inside the firm podcast in 2017 because that would have been year seven. And we started, we basically went back in time in those first episodes and talked about how we started, how we did it, how you could do it too. And now, you know, eight years later, we're 700 plus episodes deep. Eventually we added a wow. Second show each week that is called Monday Morning Coffee. Then said the firm, and I'll have folks like you on. I've had Late Great John McAfee of McAfee Software on folks like that in the business world. And we have these really interesting conversations in both regards. And that's the whole point of the, the, the, the podcast. It's not about and this, it's also like this amazing networking tool as like we're doing right now. Mitch. Exactly. You know, just, I just never know when I'm going to run into folks in real life that I've had on the show that I've had me on the show. I do a lot of guesting now. It's such a powerful tool. It makes you a better speaker because you hear yourself and you go, I want to get rid of the US.

B (24:30)

Ands or whatever you knows likes. Right?

C (24:33)

Yeah.

B (24:34)

I want to say left to people. Yeah. One of my, one of my superpowers is I train public speakers on how to sell from the stage as a specialty area. And the most valuable feedback I can give somebody is record yourself and watch it and see yourself. You will learn much more than my coaching. You will self coach because you'll feel the pain of saying you know or right. All these filler words that are unnecessary and degrades your perceived intelligence.

C (25:10)

Yeah. And you know, as the young kids would say, it will make you cringe. You will see all the cringe and you will not want to be cringy anymore when you do that.

B (25:20)

Very, very true.

C (25:22)

Yeah. Alex and I taught at CU Boulder for over a decade and that one of the the students would have to give two presentations, a midterm and a final for their design project. And that's exactly the kind of advice we gave them to Mitch. As we said, go record yourself and watch it and you'll change real quick. Because you know, you're your own worst. You're your worst critic for sure. So I love that.

B (25:46)

Well, and athletes, they have to look at footage. It's painful, but you learn from it because you get to zing yourself for mistakes. Why didn't I block that shot? Why didn't I shoot here? Why, why, why, why did I make a misstep? If you're climbing a mountain, I should have seen that. And then you will have that embedded to be better next time.

C (26:14)

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

B (26:16)

It's a. It's a great vehicle. So if people want to get a hold of Land Psycho, where do they go?

C (26:24)

Oh, man. Go to LinkedIn. As I mentioned earlier, just type in L, A, N, C, E. Last name C, A, Y, K, O. I will link in with, with anybody, especially through our network, Mitch. And if you want to check out everything on what we're doing, architecture, engineering, construction, all that good stuff, development, go to f9productions.com Sign up for our newsletter and then by all means, check out the. Check out the podcast inside the firmpodcast.com and last and certainly not least, go to Fishing with Lance. Subscribe. We're almost up to 50, 000 subscribers.

B (26:53)

Wow.

C (26:54)

Yeah, thank you. We're a real YouTuber.

B (26:56)

I know how hard that is to.

C (26:58)

So hard there.

B (26:59)

Oh my gosh. Especially in a niche like that. That's fantastic. 50.

C (27:04)

Thank you.

B (27:05)

How long you. Well, I can appreciate it because YouTube has been a challenge for me. I've been growing it slowly and gosh, I have. Oh, it's not easy. Yeah. I'm mostly focused on uploading the podcast episodes and creating shorts using a program called Opus pr which extracts the shorts out of the long form videos. That seems to have helped bolstered a week ago on a tech journey about SEO for. For sure. Maybe another. Another episode. Well, that's great. And I'm going to create. Just so you know, I'm saying this on air, not off record, but we'll do that once we finalize here. I'm going to be producing a podcast summit coming up in the next few months and I would love to invite you to share some of your secrets of producing a seven year running podcast. That's no small feat because most podcast quit podcasters quit after eight episodes. I'm very much into numbers and looking at it and it seems to. I'm going to ask this question. At what point did you realize I'm in for the long haul? How many episodes in.

C (28:21)

100.

B (28:22)

Okay. That is after we hit hearing that do you?

C (28:26)

Okay, cool. Yeah, I was. I had to.

B (28:28)

And the stats and the eight is where people quit. That's first wave.

C (28:34)

Yeah.

B (28:34)

They get to eight episodes and they stop first. I. I give accolades to anybody that does it because there's a lot to get into the process of at least doing it, uploading, setting it all up, buying the mics. But eight, they. They quit because, oh, my gosh, there's a lot of work with editing, and I got to pay, you know, blah, blah, blah. Then 50 is the next benchmark. 100 is where people start to see they reap what they've sown.

C (29:00)

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's. I want to just make sure they get this out, though, and say, even now, a little bird will whisper in my ear sometimes and say, should we quit? Because it is. Sometimes it's fruitless. And I'm not looking for, like, a monetary reward with it or anything like that. It's just. It just. It gets. It's a slog. It's a slog. Sometimes. You know, it's like, even to go guest on shows, you're like, oh, another interview. Not. Not this one, Mitch, because you. I got to see the rubber chicken.

B (29:35)

Well, but you.

C (29:36)

You.

B (29:37)

You shared. Let me tell you. You got the yellow chicken. For entertainment, you get the green one. Because you mentioned the Magic Number of 100 podcasts is where you started to see the fruits of your labor. So you get the green one, and there are two different chickens. Not everybody gets the green one, Lance. But you truly came through for me today.

C (30:00)

That's why I feel like it's going to be a lucky day. Now, Mitch, you've got the green squeeze. Oh, my gosh.

B (30:04)

And green is money.

C (30:07)

Yes.

B (30:07)

So may you have a profitable day as a result of being on this podcast. And I do. I will chat with you after we conclude the show. I'd like to invite you to come and share your ideas and get more exposure on the summit that's coming up.

C (30:22)

Cool. Sounds great.

B (30:24)

All right, so go to LinkedIn. Find Lance, Lance Psycho. C A Y, K, O. And if you're in the Colorado market and you want a man that'll call you back for him and his partner, something very basic but forgotten in today's service. Lance Psycho. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been an amazing expert on Amazing Authorities podcast. We'll see you next time.

A (30:52)

Thanks for tuning in to the Amazing Authorities podcast. If today's episode inspired you, take a moment to subscribe, rate and leave a review. It helps more experts like you rise to the top for behind the scenes access and free resources to boost your authority. Head to MitchCarson.com until next time, stay amazing.